Right now in Google Chrome, if you close a tab, it is downloaded immediately to help clean up memory, something Chrome has been known to grab. That means if you accidentally close a tab and need to reopen it, you’re essentially opening the page again. As seen by the people in Chrome Story, Google Chrome is preparing an experiment to make the “Reopen Closed Tab” feature almost instantaneous.
Instead of immediately erasing the data, Chrome will freeze everything related to the page and store it in a special cache for a short time. Once the feature starts, if you use “Reopen Closed Tab” within a few seconds of closing a tab, you should be able to instantly reopen, rather than reload the page.
The development team details the planned acceleration of “Reopen Closed Tab” in a public design document, calling it “Closed Tab Cache.” According to the document, the closed tab cache relies on another experimental work in progress feature, “BackForwardCache”, which saves some of the recently visited pages so that Chrome’s Back and Forward buttons work almost instantly.
We want to make the ‘Reopen Closed Tab’ button instant for recently closed tabs. We are currently (June 2020) actively working on the delivery of BackForwardCache for Chrome. This cache will make navigation back and forth instantaneous. We want to reuse the work that is being done there so that we can quickly restore recently closed tabs. The primary use case is accidental clicks where restoration occurs shortly after shutdown. We hope to get a great UX gain by being able to restore such tabs instantly with all their status.
As for when we can expect to see this improvement in the “Reopen Closed Tab” experience, it is likely to be a few months at least as BackForwardCache is still in a “test” state and will likely need to be started first.
Interestingly, the design document also notes that Chrome for Android already has a recently closed form of caching, which activates the handy “Undo” option of the mobile browser. These recently planned improvements should make the tab reopening process more consistent between Chrome for Android and the desktop versions of Chrome.
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